12
Mar

Nothing Like Waking Up to Fraud

— by Tiffany in Tidbits

Ugh…this morning I had the very unfortunate experience of logging on to my PayPal account and seeing a charge I did not make. :( Not only do I almost never use my PayPal debit card I was positive I had NOT forgotten a shopping spree at Barnes and Noble.com two days ago.

The lovely people at B&N reversed the charges immediately and were able to tell me that whoever made the purchase used my name, billing address, and card# but entered a different, local shipping address. Grrr…it makes it even worse when it is someone local ya know? But of course that helped me remember that I had only ever given out that card # once and it was to a local person. I had ordered pizza over the phone for my tax lady around a week ago.

So mystery solved…the young gal at the pizza place most likely wrote down the card info and pocketed it…then used it a few days later. Now I have to spend a bunch of time tracking down info, cancelling my card, and filing police reports. AND this also made me remember that this exact thing happened one other time two years ago. I gave my card  # out over the phone locally and within a week I had a fraudulent charge. I knew this town was economically depressed but this is nuts!

Anyway it is a nice reminder to be more careful with my check card info.

Thursday, March 12th, 2009

9 Comments

  • http://www.dinewithoutwhine.com Christine

    Oh that stinks! It’s a good reminder though! It is sad we can’t trust local stores though.

  • http://mamaknj.blogspot.com mama k

    oh man. I’m sorry you have to go through all that.

  • Alice Santoro

    So sorry Tiffany. It’s a sickening feeling. My company was bought by another and our payroll was then processed in Winter Park, FL. I am sure you can see where this is going… yep someone from there stole my identity. They had a crazy fun time in Florida.

    Good luck in resolving all this and SOON!

  • http://enviromama.blogspot.com Jenny

    I’m sorry and it is such a hassle. I hope the police reports, etc don’t take up too much of your time. I left my cc at Target about 7 years ago (right at the checkout) and I’m sure it was the cashier who pocketed it. I had to file a police report for them to drop the charges and they eventually caught the person so it was worth the hassle.

  • http://www.naturalmomstalkradio.com/blog Carrie at NaturalMomsTalkRadio

    yikes, hate you had to deal with that. so interesting though that people are scared to shop online when it’s almost always offline cashiers that steal!

  • Jackie

    That stinks! I totally understand – that’s happened to my husband and I twice down here in FL – both times were local restaurants when we ordered food to be delivered. Now we always pick up our food and pay w/ cash. It’s sad that people will do that to others!

  • Linda

    The only time this happened to me was the exact same situation – a pizza delivery person used the card number.

  • Ashley

    I don’t use Paypal anymore because I had someone fraudulently go in and remove money from my paypal account. They also used it to buy things for themselves.

  • http://wonderfullyandfearfullymade.blogspot.com/ Betty

    Don’t know what credit card you use but Bank of America has a really GREAT service called ShopSafe which issues a temporary credit card number for each purchase. It’s charged to your existing credit card with them but no-one knows the number but you. Maybe yours does too. Worth looking into. Makes me feel much safer not giving out a number someone can use again.